EFI vs BIOS and GPT vs MBR in EasyBCD

[ixtlanian]

Most modern computers support both BIOS and UEFI.
Windows 7 BCD comes in two flavors:

• BIOS BCD is located in \boot\bcd
• EFI BCD is located in \efi\microsoft\boot\bcd

Many computers support hybrid boot - both BIOS and EFI and are supposed to try EFI first and then fallback to BIOS if EFI boot fails. However it does not always work. So some computers have EFI shells that allow specifying a boot file on a particular media. That is still not very common.

Now I understand that BCD Deployment section of EasyBCD supports only BIOS BCD installation. Also Write MBR option does not seem to imply GPT disk support.

Hence my questions:

• Please elaborate on BIOS vs UEFI as it applies to EasyBCD
• Please elaborate on MBR vs GPT as it applies to EasyBCD
• Ideally it would be nice to select the disk type in BCD Deployment section and it would be nice to choose the BCD type (BIOS, MBR, or both) when deploying BCD to a new disk
• It would be great to have an option to force either BIOS or EFI boot option for my boot entries where booth entries (ISOs in my case) have both BIOS and EFI BCDs.

So to summarize - I am interested in full support both for main BCD and for full support of both options within boot entries.

I am new to this, but here's the list of resources I found helpful:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/wind.../gg463525.aspx
• http://www.uefi.org/events/UEFI-Plugfest-WindowsBootEnvironment.pdf
  
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh265131(WS.10).aspx
  
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...64(WS.10).aspx

[Computer Guru]

Hi ixtlanian,

I hate to break it to you, but... EasyBCD has zero EFI and GPT support.
It will configure EFI machines, but only so long as they have both MBR emulation and BIOS BCD chaining enabled.

I will need to buy an EFI machine to be able to develop EFI support for EasyBCD. At the moment, it is not feasible to do so.

[ixtlanian]

Mahmoud, Thanks for your reply. I would appreciate if you keep this thread live and respond to it when you start your testing.
I would gladly contribute some of my time to testing.
It seems that 2012-2013 might actually see mainstream EFI adoption, as past 2 years saw it for x64 architectures.

[Computer Guru]

Yes, I would hope so. EFI is a rather promising technology bringing what are, in my opinion, much needed updates and features to the lowest levels of the PC environment.
Unfortunately it'll be another 10 years or so before companies can write software targeting EFI alone and forgoing BIOS machines, but we'll get there.... eventually